Collected Short Stories, Page 3

  “I’m lost,” Allegra says. “Me. My identity. I’m off the books.”

  “I see. Full name and PIN, please.”

  Allegra hates these exchanges. She knows that the moment she put her hands on the scanners the clerk instantly had all of her information on the screen in front of him. He’s some kind of little by-the-book quisling, she thinks. Fine. She gives him a friendly smile.

  “Allegra Elizabeth Kosinski. A639Y7734-VV.”

  “Double V? You’re a mandatory.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “I see the problem. It’s our fault. I apologize.”

  Allegra’s smile widens. “It’s okay. Can you fix it?”

  “Easy. This happens sometimes with mandatories, especially when termination might be involved. A system glitch keeps the software running after the body’s gone. We’ve complained to IT a million times.”

  “Termination?”

  “Yep. According to the records, your last appeal was heard and rejected and your, that is your body, was executed on August twenty-second at 7:12 a.m., Pacific time. That’s why your identity is invalid in the database.”

  “I’m dead, “ says Allegra.

  “The system should have deleted you three months back, but no harm done. You just got a little bonus time. Sort of like winning the lottery, right?”

  “But. . .”

  “I’m sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.”

  “What do I. . .?” The clerk hits a button and Allegra blips out of existence.

  “Next,” he calls and the other ghosts move up a step.

  THE END

  Dark Jubilee

  Every 50 years, the ancients turned their world on its head. They called this period "Jubilee." All laws were suspended, all slaves freed. All lands won in battle were returned to their previous owners. Jubilee was a time of renewal and madness. A time to burn the fields — both physical and metaphysical.

  When Congress is suspended during the revived Jubilee celebrations, Senators and members of the House of Representatives are replaced with gogo boys and peep show girls. The president's cabinet and supreme court find themselves bumping and grinding behind peep show glass alongside cops, Ikea sales clerks, and neurosurgeons.

  Starting in the northwest, city halls are transformed into 24/7 sex clubs. Sex clubs become art galleries and planetariums.

  The new Jubilee politicians pass laws constantly, then make it illegal to enforce them. The laws that remain are deliberately random and ludicrous. It becomes illegal to carry an umbrella while eating sushi. It is, furthermore, illegal to attempt sexual relations with an animal while either party is on fire. Those found guilty of these charges might find themselves banished to the sewers with nothing but a candle and a baseball bat. Or they might be made Archbishop of their town.

  During Jubilee, "E Pluribus Unum" is replaced with "Forma et Periculous," Beauty and Danger. The national anthem is replaced with Fats Waller's Ain't Misbehavin'.

  Anyone can apply for the position of Prophet or Saint. Those selected are promptly crucified by one of the mobile Sacrifice Centers that cruise all the major cities.

  Anyone bored with their current life can enter a national exchange program and trade houses, careers, and spouses with other Jubilee celebrants.

  Prison doors are thrown open. Cops and felons exchange places frequently, fluidly, as is their nature.

  The president for the duration of Jubilee is a noted porn actress; her cabinet consists of performance artists, high-ranking members of the Crips and Bloods, a Santeria priest, a troupe of Russian contortionists, and a spoon-bending psychic.

  Dotcoms burn their servers. Newspapers burn their presses. Nuclear power plants go offline and their irradiated workers dance naked in the melting ruins, swinging uranium rods over their heads like tiki torches.

  Troops of art students commandeer hydraulic window-washing lifts and string cables between downtown skyscrapers, setting up bungie jumps, thirty-floor swing sets, and urban hang-gliding runways. City workers, more used to repairing roads and freeway overpasses, use miles of city pipes, concrete, and wire to construct jungle gyms that swallow up whole neighborhoods.

  Cripples equip their motorized wheelchairs with wheel-cutting spikes to stage Ben-Hur-style chariot races on freeways. Kids and toughs across the country have their legs surgically removed to join in the wheelchair lifestyle.

  NASA launches mylar balloons the size of Manhattan into geosynchronous orbit over the midwest. The solar winds buffet the balloons, twisting them into a continuously morphing tangle of light and motion, like a space-borne lava lamp. Closer to the ground, NASA officials flood the launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center, allowing the Everglades to overgrow the site. Lianas snake up the gantries alongside rusting Saturn 5 boosters. The Shuttle fleet becomes a herd of fossil dinosaurs sunning themselves in a concrete lagoon. Their corroded interiors become homes for tropical birds and alligators.

  As the rites of Jubilee become more bold and more frenzied, the laws of physics break down. Flying is permitted in clearly marked areas. The rotation of the earth varies due to peoples' moods. Some neighborhoods are warm with sunlight twenty-four hours a day. Others are swallowed in perpetual night and become the sites for endless firework displays, bonfires, and Molotov cocktail parties. Fish begin to talk. Birds write best-selling novels. All diseases are cured. The Anti-Christ comes and goes without notice. Armageddon is postponed due to lack of interest.

  THE END

  Dog Boys

  Setting down his drink, Cormac Thomas Garfield runs his fingers over a deep scar on his chest. It's the site of his first harvesting, the reason he came to Austin all those years ago. No one speaks to Cormac as he sips straight Jack Daniels at a sunny corner table in the cafe'. Young men of Cormac's profession tend to carry peculiar odors, and an old man such as Cormac positively stinks.

  He began his career as a Dog Boy (officially, a hinterland Canaille), growing botulism toxins in polymer sacs installed in his gut. Later, he graduated to necrotizing venoms and exotic ion-channel neurotoxins. There were worse things, too. Tiny beasts, like crabs, but with teeth. He, along with a hundred other boys, had to vomit them out into stainless steel tubs while men in hazmat suits stood by with guns ready to shoot them in case it went badly and the animals began to eat their way out of their stomachs. There were always a few casualties during these harvests.

  Boys didn't last long in Cormac's profession, which saved the royal family from having to pay for their many infirmities when they grew old. Cormac has stubbornly, rudely, refused to die, costing the Treasury a tidy sum. He is despised by both ordinary men and the government, but he is a hero of the State, with a medal to prove it. His assassination, even a convenient accident, is out of the question. His blood is so toxic that if he were wounded in a public place, he could contaminate a whole city sector.

  Cormac has a mechanical eye — a retirement present from Prince Samuel Patrick Houston — but it hasn't worked in years, except to intermittently show him flickering gray silhouettes lost in blizzards of static. Cormac has come to believe that these figures are the ghosts of the millions murdered in the Mexican Wars with the poisons manufactured in his body. The ghosts are trying to tell him something, but he can't understand what. He speaks to the ghosts, and the other patrons at the cafe, already disgusted by his blackened teeth and stinking flesh, move away from his yammering.

  Cormac orders more Jack Daniels shots. He is a hero. The cafe owner has no choice but to serve him. When Cormac starts to leave, the owner refuses the old man's money. He leaves cash on the table anyway, but the owner sweeps it and his glass into a plastic container and burns them down by a canal in back of his cafe.

  A few weeks later, when Cormac dies, the city secretly rejoices. Cormac's body is incinerated in a special biohazard facility deep in the mountains beyond El Paso. Despite this, the winds change and an acid rain falls like metallic-smelling tar on the capital. The monsoon curdles roads.
It ruins delicate building facades and dish antennae. It erases the faces from every public statue in the city. The runoff contaminates the ground water, and thousands die horribly, coughing up blood and flesh-eating spider-like things. The royal family flees the city as a strange plague moves through the streets, killing rich and poor alike. A new crop of Dog Boys is bought in from the provinces. The plague intrigues the kingdom's scientists. It is a new flower to cultivate in the red gardens of the Dog Boys' blood.

  THE END

  Field Trip

  We came across these words spoken by Hassan I Sabbah, Sheikh of the Mountains and leader of the Assassins: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

  Inspired, we brought chicken blood, a Hand of Glory and a pocketful of Goofer Dust with us on our fifth grade school trip to the Museum of Natural History.

  Our boldest and most skilled practitioner of the black arts, Courtney Anne Walters, climbed on the pedestal in the lobby and marked out an inverted pentagram with the blood. Then she cast the dust and set the Hand of Glory in the center of a magic circle.

  Mrs. Romano, our teacher, was yelling at the top of her lungs for Courtney to get down. Courtney did as she was told, and so did the Tyrannosaurus Rex that Courtney had just re-animated.

  As a sort of field test, Courtney had the beast (all animated bones, like the skeleton swordsmen in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, our favorite movie back then) eat Mrs. Romano. It gobbled her down and we kids cheered.

  When the head of the museum appeared to see what the ruckus was about, Courtney sicced the dinosaur on him, too. "Don't be ridiculous. This is a place of science," he said calmly before the beast's jaws could snap shut. The dinosaur looked puzzled. Then it fell to pieces, bones scattering across the marble lobby floor.

  Everything might be permitted, we learned, but it only takes one killjoy to ruin everyone's good time.

  THE END

  Food Chain Blues

  A filler piece went out over the newswires, just one of those Isn't It A Crazy World pieces they use to make newspaper columns come out straight. The headline on the piece read, Texas Town Toaster Thief, and it recounted how on the previous Sunday night every toaster in Longtree, Texas, had disappeared. Police, it said, were still investigating.

  The thief must have had friends because a few days later, all the coffeemakers and automatic garage door openers in Phoenix, Arizona, went missing. New Mexico's VCRs were next. This time, the theft wasn't in a single city. Every VCR in the state was gone overnight. Still, the national press didn't really pick up on the story until the incident in Vegas.

  Billy Coltrane had the second biggest and magic show on the Strip (just short of Sigfried and Roy). The highlight of each night's performance was the moment when he'd leap from a platform high over the stage, mimicking a high-dive act. Of course, he'd never hit the martini glass set mid-stage, but would open his arms and fly gracefully above the delighted faces of the wildly-applauding audience. It was a simple trick, done with hair-thin steel wires and a nearly silent electric winch concealed below the stage.

  On the night in question, Coltrane was in fine form, turning lions into kittens and making women squeal when he'd pull their underwear out of his jacket pocket. When it came time for his flying bit, he mounted the ladder with an enthusiasm he hadn't felt in weeks. The strobes went wild as he hit the platform, distracting the audience enough for assistants to discreetly clip the harness wires to his back. Then Coltrane swan-dived into the air. Later, an autopsy revealed that he had broken ninety-eight percent of the bones in his body when he'd plunged headfirst to the stage. The winch was gone from the basement. So were all the other winches and water pumps in Las Vegas. The lights in the city went out when the generators at Hoover Dam-each bigger than a house and weighing more than a locomotive-vanished.

  Search jets from White Sands Air Force Base found the machines next day. It wasn't hard. All they had to do was follow the line of cars, golf carts, fork lifts, cherry pickers, fire trucks, semis and tour buses in Las Vegas as they drove out of the city in an orderly line, heading to a canyon in the open desert, where the other missing machines were gathered.

  CNN, all the television networks, Telemundo, and the European and Asian press were at the canyon within a day, doing live feeds until their microwave uplinks stopped working. Their broadcast trucks took off without them, driving across the desert to join the mechanical throng.

  Machines came from every direction. From the north came a steady stream of hair dryers, electric shoe polishers, industrial refrigeration units, punch presses, dentist drills and PDAs. From the west came airport x-ray machines, yellow Komatsu bulldozers, Chinook military helicopters and enough vibrators to shake the Sierra Nevadas. Unmanned C-47s touched down, disgorging loads of missing household appliances and telephone switching systems. They rolled and tumbled down the loading gate to join their comrades.

  A nervous colonel at White Sands ordered an air strike on the strange gathering. But the jets just circled overhead and when their bombs fell, they were all duds. Backhoes and cranes dug them free from the desert floor and bought them into the growing group. The jets ejected their pilots and joined the party.

  More machines arrived every day. Big and small, old and new. They came rolling, flying, crawling and hopping. Billions of them, all the mechanical devices in the world, it seemed. They spilled from the bleak canyon, up the walls and into the open waste. Then, at some unseen signal, the machines began to change.

  They moved together, in an almost organic way, the way one microscopic organism engulfs and swallows another. Only the machines weren't swallowing each other, the big machines were absorbing the small ones into themselves, making their bodies into giant meta-machines. The mechanical morphing went on for days, like some metallic germ warfare experiment, like a vast surrealist film. The canyon was full of the churning, heaving, clanking, scraping bodies of machines tearing themselves apart and remaking themselves.

  When they were done, almost a week later, what filled the canyon was a shining, perfect spiral-a Golden Ratio, the divine proportion. The great metallic towers glowed in the sun like some graceful Gaudi-designed refinery. What were the machines waiting for? The reporters had a lot of theories. A handful of journalists were always standing by on the canyon's rim. Over the previous two weeks, they'd set up a kind of pony express using bicycles, running back and forth into Vegas, bringing out food and water. Pens and paper, too. The cell phones and laptops had all gone into the canyon, and the manual typewriters they had found in Vegas junk shops hurt their wrists and the keys jammed, fouled by the desert sand.

  There was a betting pool among the reporters. Either the whole event was the greatest hoax of all time, some sick joke or publicity stunt, or what was in the valley was some secret weapon doomsday weapon run amok. The local cops and fire fighters got in on the gambling action, too. It was twenty dollars a bet. If the world blew up, someone was going to be very rich.

  At dawn on the nineteenth day, a rumble started in the center of the valley. Everyone rushed to the canyon's edge. Below, fire rimmed the base of the central machine structure and it slowly, blasted into the air, a junkyard Saturn 5. A second, slightly smaller machine mound rose, then another. The spiral was unraveling itself, shooting metal spores into the sky. That was when the reporters realized that it was over. There wasn't a bomb in the canyon. There were never going to be any bombs or toasters or Mustang convertibles again.

  In some circles, there's a popular theory that humans are nothing more than sacks of genetic data, Noah's Arks with cable TV-slaves to our genes, short-lived and utterly disposable. We imagine ourselves to be at the top of the food chain because that's how our genes like It. It lets them get away with murder.

  As the reporters pedaled back to Vegas on their mountain bikes to file their stories, they understood that while our genes may be smarter than we are, there was something even smarter than biology. And it had just flown the coop, abandoning us here with our selfish genes and our
cosmically bruised pride, never to return.

  THE END

  Hall of the Phoenix Machines

  The suicide machines seemed to have only one purpose: to destroy themselves. Their grace, their complexity, the sureness and boldness of their design made that seem absurd, but there they were, ripping themselves to scrap. Were they alien devices with some unfathomable purpose? scientists asked. Were they terrestrial constructions that had gone horribly, horribly wrong?

  The suicide machines were housed in a vast hall in the center of an enormous nickel-iron asteroid, just beyond the orbit of Mars. Someone had obviously constructed the hall for the machines. Of course, devices as large and complex as the suicide machines, could easily have built the place themselves. The hall was purely functional, a planet-sized machine shop, full of smaller, simpler contraptions obviously used to construct and repair the suicide machines. In fact, the whole complex seemed designed to build the machines and allow them to demolish themselves, so that the smaller machines to put the pieces back together. Then it could all begin again.

  The scientists studied the machines. Took readings. Argued. Wrote books. Went on lecture tours. One scientist had a nervous breakdown. Another quit and became a born-again evangelist. The suicide machines continued destroying themselves and other machines put them back together.

  THE END

  Heat Island

  Even the rats were gone. There was nothing to eat, nothing left to scavenge. Why should they stay? The great east coast fault line, miles beneath Manhattan, had shifted dramatically for the fist time in millions of years. A slip of ten feet had wiped out many of the cities of the northeast, and had leveled Manhattan. Barnett was going to rebuild the city.